Undoubtedly an unhealthy habit, but my morning starts off scrolling. Every week I resolve to peer serenely out the window instead, but the temptation to stick a toe in the murky twitter pool proves irresistible. So even without research I would have dared to say what three French economists published this week: that Twitter strongly determines what journalists write about. In short: even if you do start the morning serenely with sourdough bread and this newspaper, you will get Twitter on your plate.
Now that research focused on 1.8 billion French tweets, but I see no reason to assume that Dutch journalists are more often outdoorsy types. I called an older colleague, John Schoorl, and asked him, diplomatically and without directly calling him a dinosaur, how he is doing without social media. Quite a story, but what stayed with me was that he told about a Mr Brugsma from the Haarlem Dagblad, who once experienced a day without news. He then went to the circus and picked up an elephant there to ride through the Korte Houtstraat: the front page. Don’t check to death, he said. You have to approach the fire, John said, so I walked for the form to the square in my Vinex district, where I found neither fire nor circus elephant.
Gone are the days when we saw social media as such a village square: we know how they encourage echo chambers and polarization. Yet journalists apparently think that that knowledge alone is enough to turn their gaze back to that of an uninhibited outsider. Last week I saw on the NOS: ‘Discussion about abortion blows over to the Netherlands’, and on NPO Radio 1: ‘Discussion about abortion also topical in the Netherlands’. I checked it at home: were we discussing abortion here? Oh, no. The cooling-off period has just been abolished, and the European Parliament wants to enshrine abortion as a fundamental right.
There was discussion on Twitter: a handful of SGP’s and FvD’ers, such as Pepijn van Houwelingen, preach love for the unborn life, if three twitterers bite, it can lead to social discord. The Twitter algorithm, which amplifies politically right-wing tweets, contributes to this. It appeared on TV that the ‘Pro-Life’ card catalog is somewhat empty: the same three very young SGP girls showed up everywhere.
Journalists, of course, continue to be branded the left and elitist, and hope to find the voice of the people on Twitter. Anyone who wants to become a media personality knows this: tweet five times a day, collect ten thousand followers, get invited to talk shows, get more followers, and so on. Sywert van Lienden, for example, worked on the range that earned him his mouth cap deal, and Caroline van der Plas started her advances with BBB. For example, social and old media occasionally hoist a Hans Worst into the saddle.
And since Cambridge Analytica, we’ve known that social media also spawn fairy tales and dragons of its own: ignoring it isn’t an option either. Whether Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter goes through, and he will relax their rules against disinformation as intended, is therefore nothing to shrug. Twitter and journalism cannot live with or without each other. New York Timesjournalists were kindly asked to cut back this year. Addiction care and a half hour daily quota seems like a start, but who am I kidding?
On the way back from the bakery I scrolled through my timeline again. Perhaps it is the fear of a dead square on Thursday afternoon that drives journalists to do so. The fear that you will soon have to get an elephant from the circus to ride down the street, something to fill the page – rather the circus on your timeline, where an elephant always thunders through.